Unlike a traditional resort, there are no garage door openers where you drive into your home, cocoon, and then have limited engagement opportunities with your neighbours. ORI is a perfect example that melds country club living with the unique outgoingness of the RV culture. This pretty much eliminates the "starting from scratch" re-establishment of social connections people have when moving to a new community.

These properties all work the same way. You purchase a lot (driveway). You then pay a monthly homeowners fee and the requisite utilities and property taxes.

Ownership rules are simple. Once you purchase a lot you must have a Class A motorhome that meets specific age and length requirements. You're not required to upgrade your rig after you buy, but the community ethic seems to ensure that even older coaches are very maintained.

After purchase, you're then responsible for the monthly HOA fees. At ORI it's $455 USD a month. When you add in property taxes and electric the good rule of thumb is that your annual operating costs will be around $7,000 USD.

Take a medium priced lot for $75,000 USD, put another $75,000 USD of improvements on it, add in a near new diesel pusher for $200,000 USD and you'll find yourself in the middle of a beautiful resort for $350,000 USD - even less if you keep your improvements and motorhome modest. This is a very attractive option, especially when you compare it to patio homes built on nearby golf course communities. Those homes are in the $800K to $1.2M USD range with all the cost burdens of sales commissions, maintenance, and country club membership.

Two rainbows shine over the clubhouse.

Lot with a solar screen

The Great Recession hammered all the homes in the Coachella Valley including the RV resorts. Prices dropped by half and while they've generally recovered, the annual increase is less than the wildly inflated SoCal and Bay Area prices you read about.

Compare traditional resort real estate to the RV resort model and the gap isn't as great as you might think. First of all, your cash outlay for an RV and a lot to park it on will generally be less than a standard down payment on a traditional home. Your carrying and transaction costs will also be way less with the RV resort model. On the other side of the ledger, you know that your RV (whether new or used) most likely will have a steep depreciation curve. However, during the 38+ degrees C (100+ degree F) summers, you can enjoy your "second home" elsewhere in cooler climates, only to return when the mercury slides back to pleasantly warm.

What's interesting is that the original developers of these luxe RV resorts all went bankrupt. Yet today, to build a resort like Outdoor Resorts Indio from scratch, you probably would have to price lots at $250,000-$500,000 USD — making it doubtful that any more will be built. The three Class-A only resorts in the Coachella Valley have a combined inventory of a little over 1,000 lots for a market area that includes the western halves of the US and Canada. Yet few know about these properties.

Unusually low valuations combined with a growing trend to improve properties are starting to move prices up. Even then, ownership should remain an extremely attractive option, but for now, it's a downright steal.